INTERPOL Notices and the Presumption of Innocence

A person can discover an INTERPOL alert at the worst possible moment, at a border, during a visa application or when a bank asks for an explanation. The word INTERPOL carries authority. It can also obscure what the underlying request actually says.

The colour matters. Some notices concern wanted people. Others concern missing children, unidentified bodies or dangerous objects. Treating them all as evidence of criminal guilt produces serious mistakes.

The colours and their purposes

The following guide summarises INTERPOL's official notice categories. The coloured symbols identify categories, rather than reproducing official notice documents.

🔴 Red Notice

Seeks a wanted person's location and provisional arrest for extradition, surrender or similar proceedings. It can concern someone sought for prosecution or someone required to serve a sentence. Those situations must be distinguished.

🔵 Blue Notice

Seeks information about a person's identity, whereabouts or activities relevant to a criminal investigation. Its purpose is information gathering.

🟢 Green Notice

Warns police about a person's criminal activities where that person is considered a possible public safety threat.

🟡 Yellow Notice

Helps find missing people, including children, and identify people unable to identify themselves.

⚫ Black Notice

Seeks information to identify a deceased person whose identity is unknown.

🟠 Orange Notice

Alerts police to a serious, imminent public safety danger involving a person, event, object or process.

🟣 Purple Notice

Exchanges information about criminal methods, equipment, objects and concealment techniques.

🔘 Silver Notice

The silver-grey category helps identify and trace assets linked to criminal activity. INTERPOL introduced it through a pilot, with the first Silver Notice published in January 2025. Locating assets and obtaining a lawful freezing or confiscation order remain separate steps. Property rights and the position of third parties still require examination.

🔷 INTERPOL–United Nations Security Council Special Notice

This category uses a blue presentation with INTERPOL and UN identifiers. It alerts police to individuals or entities subject to Security Council sanctions. The applicable UN measures determine the restrictions concerned.

What a Red Notice establishes

According to INTERPOL's explanation of Red Notices, the request rests on a national arrest warrant or court order. Each country decides its legal response under its own law. INTERPOL has no power to compel a national authority to arrest the person concerned.

A Red Notice therefore does not operate as a universal arrest warrant. Equally, calling it merely an alert can underestimate the consequences. Domestic law may permit provisional detention, followed by an extradition process in which further legal questions arise.

For a person sought for prosecution, the notice establishes neither guilt nor the reliability of every allegation in the originating case. For a person sought to serve a sentence, it remains necessary to understand the judgment, its procedural history and any relevant challenge. A headline that collapses both situations into a finding by INTERPOL misdescribes the institution's role.

Diffusions need separate attention

A diffusion is circulated directly by a country's National Central Bureau to selected countries or more widely. It can seek cooperation for purposes corresponding to the colour system. Diffusions must also comply with INTERPOL's rules. Their distinct circulation route does not justify assuming they have identical procedures or consequences to published notices.

This is why searching INTERPOL's public website cannot provide a complete answer. Much of the information in the system is available only to law enforcement. An empty public search result cannot safely be treated as confirmation that no relevant record exists.

Challenging the use of the system

Article 3 of INTERPOL's Constitution prohibits activities of a political, military, religious or racial character. Whether a particular case falls within that prohibition requires analysis of its substance and context. Political prominence alone does not resolve the question. Nor does the use of an ordinary criminal label settle whether a request is compliant.

The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL's Files, or CCF, considers requests concerning access to, correction of and deletion of data within INTERPOL's system. A submission should explain the defect in the data or its processing and provide the documents needed to assess it. The CCF does not conduct the domestic criminal trial or decide guilt.

An INTERPOL challenge may therefore need to proceed alongside a defence in the requesting state and urgent representation in the country where the person is located. Deletion of INTERPOL data does not, by itself, cancel the national warrant or end a separate extradition case.

Accurate language is part of due process. The proper question is what cooperation has been requested, on what legal basis and with what safeguards. The answer begins with the notice itself, including its colour. It cannot be inferred from the institutional name alone.